Lure of the Rings

An authority
on J.R.R. Tolkien,
English professor Jane Chance understands the

Lure of the Rings
…………………………………………………………………

BY CHRISTOPHER
DOW
Special to the Rice News

Elves and trolls.
Wizards and Dark Riders. A magical ring. And, of course,
those little people with furry feet — hobbits.

In the nearly
half a century since readers were introduced to the fantastic
world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,”
the book has sold more than 100 million copies. It has been
translated into just about every major language, and Tolkien
societies can be found worldwide. The new movie version,
part one of which was released this past holiday season,
was perhaps the most anticipated movie in history.

If it seems
amazing that a fantasy set in an imaginary realm called
Middle-earth and featuring such unlikely heroes as hobbits
could generate such powerful interest, even more curious
is that this popular epic recently has been hailed as one
of the greatest books of the 20th century. That idea is
no surprise to Rice English professor Jane Chance, however.
Chance has been teaching “The Lord of the Rings”
(LotR) since 1976, and she has authored several books and
collections of essays on Tolkien and his work. Revised editions
of two of those books — “Tolkien’s Art: A
Mythology for England” (first published in 1979) and
“Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power” (first
published in 1992) — were rereleased this past year
by the University Press of Kentucky.

Chance’s
expertise is medieval mythography, Anglo–Saxon and
Middle English literature and Chaucer, and most of her 15
books, including her award-winning two-volume magnum opus,
“Medieval Myth-ography,” are on those topics.
She also serves as general editor of the Library of Medieval
Women and series co-editor of the new Greenwood Guide to
Historical Events in the Ancient and Medieval World. But
what she is known for these days is her understanding of
Tolkien and his works. “I’ve spent a lifetime
studying mythography, and Tolkien had been an ancillary,
fun interest. It’s ironic to me that I’m important
now as an authority on Tolkien, because that has nothing
to do with what I normally consider important in my work.”

Tolkien’s
work has sufficiently intrigued her that, in addition to
publishing books on the subject, she organized two sessions
on Tolkien at last year’s International Congress on
Medieval Studies (ICMS) — the first time that Tolkien
has been formally discussed at the ICMS in its more than
30 years. The sessions have led to yet another book, “Tolkien
the Medievalist,” a collection of theoretically driven
essays by Tolkien scholars that will be published soon in
the Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture series
by Routledge LTD.

Besides, there’s
no mistaking the glow in her eyes as she discusses Tolkien’s
epic, its cultural context and its internal meanings.

Chance was in
her first teaching job, at the University of Saskatchewan,
when a medievalist colleague recommended “LotR.”
“I got immersed in the magic of it and just devoured
all three volumes. I certainly became convinced that it
was a text you could teach and that it was worthy of scholarly
study,” she said.

Tolkien, a professor
of Old and Middle English literature at Leeds and Oxford,
was unhappy, Chance explained, with the lack of an English
mythology. “He wanted to create a mythic world that
could do justice to the richness of English culture,”
she said. “England has no mythic gods, no identifiable
corpus of heroes like the ones in Ovid’s ‘Metamorphosis’
or Homer. You could point to King Arthur, but those legends
were affected by French Norman influence, which Tolkien
didn’t like. What he did have was a corpus of work
in Old and Middle English, such as ‘Beowulf’ and
‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ and Scandinavian
sagas, such as the Norse Eddas. But most of those are about
Scandinavian, not English, heroes.”

Even so, Tolkien’s
knowledge of northern European myth and languages profoundly
influenced his work, particularly with regard to the themes,
images and structures he used and the names he gave to people
and places. Frodo, for example, is from the Old English
word “frod,” which means wise, and “mordor”
is the Anglo–Saxon word for death.

Certainly, though,
the reality of two world wars affected Tolkien as profoundly
as any myth. “Many of his good friends whom he had
gone to school with died in World War I,” Chance said.
“He never got over that.”

Much of “LotR”
was written during World War II, and many readers have drawn
parallels between Sauron, the Dark Lord, and Adolf Hitler,
and between the blasted landscape of Mordor and the destruction
of the European countryside. While Tolkien denied that “LotR”
was a veiled reference to the war, Chance said that there
is a growing body of work by scholars who are interested
in it as a reaction to World War II. She explained that
in Tolkien’s written denials, “if you read carefully,
what he’s saying is that he doesn’t want his work
to be taken as an allegory of the war. He always talks about
applicability, that the war might be applicable to the situation.”

When Tolkien
first created hobbits in “The Hobbit,” they were
childlike creatures about whom he could create stories for
his children. But in “LotR,” with the backdrop
of World War II, they took on another nuance. “I think
he was saying that they are ordinary, everyday people who
may be called on to perform in extraordinary circumstances
and find heroism in themselves,” Chance explained.
“He was responding to the need for everyone to help
their country during the war.”

Chance believes
that today’s readers and viewers of the movie will
similarly link “LotR’s” battle between good
and evil with current world events. “It’s very
much comparable to what’s going on right now in America
following Sept. 11. How do you deal with that kind of enormous
threat to peace and harmony and civilization? ‘The
Lord of the Rings’ provides the solution in the title
of the first volume, ‘The Fellowship of the Ring.’
The solution is fellowship — the idea that people have
to band together. We have to learn to be part of a community
and accept and tolerate that which makes us different, as
do the members of the fellowship. Only in that way can we
help each other work together as a community. Actually,
that’s a powerful Christian message. Tolkien was a
staunch Roman Catholic, and he drew on that other chief
influence in his work.”

“LotR”
is the story of an epic heroic quest, yet Tolkien frequently
inverts the established heroic formula in which the hero’s
quest to achieve something culminates in a battle where
the hero triumphs against the villain. Often after that,
there is a happy ending.

In “LotR,”
there is a climactic battle, but it is a distraction, not
the key. While the battle of the armies is taking place,
the real hero, Frodo Baggins, is sneaking into Mordor through
the back door. For Tolkien, Chance said, humility and self-control
are the true virtues of the hero, and the important battle
for those take place within Frodo himself.

“What Tolkien
has done with Frodo is so brilliant. Frodo could have used
the ring [an artifact that grants power to the wearer] to
become a Dark Lord and take what he wanted. Instead, he
carries it through Mordor to destroy it. So the ultimate
heroism is an act of renunciation, not of boast, which is
very hard. That’s one element of the book that is so
appealing, because we’re all anxious to leave something
of our lives for posterity. Tolkien, through Frodo, is saying
that it’s ok to be the way we are and do something
in our lives that maybe nobody will ever know about. And
who knows that Frodo has accomplished something so amazing
and saved Middle-earth except Gandalf [a wizard and ally
of Frodo] and the fellowship?”

The epic irony
is that, in the end, Frodo ultimately falls prey to the
enervating power of the ring, and he fails. He doesn’t
throw the ring into the fire but decides to retain possession
of it — or let it possess him. “The part students
most love to talk about is that ending,” Chance said.
“The doubles there are multiple and therefore rather
exciting in an analogical way.”

Tolkien even
turns the traditional happy ending on its head. “I’m
not so sure it is a happy ending,” Chance said. “The
destruction of the ring and the fall of the Dark Lord crystallize
things, but it’s interesting that Tolkien didn’t
stop there. Things have changed in the Shire toward industrialization,
and they’ll never return to the idyllic days that existed
before. Frodo and the elves go away to the Grey Havens,
leaving a world without wisdom and magic, as history moves
into the age of Man, which is a lesser age.”

The epic does
not end on a note of doom, though, for Samwise Gamgee, a
hobbit and friend of Frodo, rebuilds the Shire. “Remember,
Sam has had that glimpse of paradise — he knows there
is a paradise, and that’s so reassuring. Tolkien talks
in some of his fairy stories about why fantasy is so reassuring,
and he says that the ultimate fantasy — in a literary
sense — is the resurrection of Christ because it means
there’s going to be a happy ending for us all somewhere
and there is some plan and order to the world.

“I think
that’s the reason many modern readers are drawn to
‘The Lord of the Rings.’ So I no longer think
of it as escapist literature. I think you can see it as
escape and read it as fantasy, but what it provides is reassurance
and consolation that the world is not a bad place but ultimately
a place of good.”

— Christopher
Dow is editor of the Sallyport.